Summer, Poem by Charles Cros

To Laure Bernard.

It is summer. The sun darts
Its inexhaustible rays
Upon the stranger who lingers
Amid the vast sands.

Like a subtle liqueur
Bathing the boundless horizon,
The air that distills from the warm soil
Makes the dreary rock quiver.

The wood of the trees cracks.
The striped tiger, the hyena,
Drawing out their scarlet tongues,
Seek water in the plain.

The elephants go in a troop,
Crushing the hedges beneath their feet
And lifting with their hindquarters
The branches of the tall woods.

There is no hollow grotto
Where the heat does not penetrate.
No shady valley
Where grass can be born.

In the garden, beneath a smooth roof
Of bamboo, Sita slumbers:
A pout grazes and wrinkles
At times her vermilion lip.

Beneath the gauze, striped with gold,
In which her beautiful body wraps itself,
Stretching, the weary one
Opens her antelope eyes.

But she waits, beneath this veil
That betrays her naked beauty,
For the first star in the sky
To announce that night has come.

Already the sun inclines
And in the murmuring sea
Goes, behind the hill,
To mirror its dying splendor.

And burned nature
Breathes at last. The brown night
Puts on its starry robe,
And, calm, the moon appears.

Charles Cros

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-summer-charles-cros/